title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by: Kawaguchi, Toshikazu published: 2020-11-17 read: 2023-02 preview

You may know my fascination with magic realism.  And many Japanese authors take this a step further, and well, yes, I have a weakness for such Japanese books.

Setting, very simple: some cafe in some Japanese city.  With a few regulars, a few random visitors, an owner and her personnel.  Mostly recurring characters as one would expect in such a place in Japan; but each chapter in the book is a separate story, only connected to the others in that the setting is the same.

The cafe has one chair, always occupied by one woman.  But when she leaves (for the toilet), others can quickly take the seat and travel back in time.  Caveat: be back before the coffee gets cold, or else you end up in that chair forever. And that one woman is freed, finally.

A somewhat artificial setting, but then also in-a-Japanese-way-credible, setting for a set of very emotional, personal stories about people, relationships, loves lost, and so on and so forth.

A beauty.  Read it.